Words for What We Do

James Oschman, PhD, speaking on Quantum Biology and Information Fields

While this post is specifically focused for practitioners, it does contain suggestions and resources for anyone interested in further exploration of the field of energy medicine.

During and after workshops, there’s one question that comes up from practitioners over and over: “I don’t know how to talk to my clients about this. How do I explain the scan? The points?” Ida Rolf once said that Rolfing® wasn’t just therapy, it was education. The same is true with SourcePoint. We are always educating our clients and ourselves about what is possible, about the nature of our bodies and the universe we dwell in. We are educating people about energy, helping them to see themselves and everything around them as energy.

Knowing this doesn’t always help when you return from a training ready to go, and you start scanning, and your client says: “What are you doing? I don’t believe in that energy stuff!” or words to that effect.

The most important thing is to establish rapport with your clients. Take time to get to know them. Do what you know, and what they have come to you for, whether it is Rolfing or massage therapy, acupuncture or craniosacral therapy, or whatever you do. As they come to trust you, you can expand the field; bring in the scan or the points, leading them gently to new experience through educating them as you go

Whenever you feel you can, you can find the right “entry point” into including SourcePoint Therapy in your work on a daily basis. The approach for each client will be different. Some people are immediately open to and interested in energy work. Others take time. With those who are hesitant, or nervous, or dismissive, introduce one thing at a time. You could start with the scan. Simply explain you are starting with an off-the-body scan to locate blockages. Clients are often surprised by what they feel during the scan. They are mainly surprised that something actually seems to be happening and sometimes they feel it themselves when you come to the blockage. As people actually experience the sensation of energy, and the benefits of working with it, they will want to know and experience more.

Or you can introduce the Diamond Points. At the end of a session, just do them. If your client asks what you are doing, say something like “I am working with points off the body that will help the body hold the work we’ve done.”

The bookThe Body has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better,by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, explains how the brain maps the body. Apparently the brain not only maps the body but also a field all around the body approximately 18 inches out. The Diamond Points are held within that range. The brain reacts to any touch in this area exactly as it would to any touch on the body, because the brain has a map for this off-the-body field. This can be a simple way to help people begin to see that touch off the body may be soothing and helpful.

SourcePoint Therapy was a featured cover article in the September 2008 issue of Massasge and Bodywork magazine. That article, written by me, is still available in their archives and in PDF format on our websiteto print out for clients.

The best words for explaining what you do, however, come from you. Absorb what you’ve learned, work with it, let it become a part of you, and you’ll be able to put it into words. Write about it: what does SourcePoint mean to you? What would you really like to share with people? Write about it, talk to others from your trainings, read about it. The more comfortable you are with what you are learning and doing, the more you integrate it into your view of the world, the easier it is to talk about it. Spend some time every day experiencing yourself and the world and the people you work with as energy, flows of energy, structures of energy, maps of energy, patterns and configurations of energy.

And, remember, we often say the path of energy work involves the radical redefinition of self. To really walk this path you have to be willing to not be the same as you were, and eventually to share with others the transformation you are undergoing. That will happen naturally, don’t worry. For now, if there are clients who want what you have always done, who don’t want the new you, then do what you have always done, but with the inner knowing and experience that you are not the same as you were, you are informed by Source, you are in touch with that Blueprint of health. You have become aware of the field in which you are working, and that will change your work.